Tulpas in Another Place

Snow was swirling as I tugged the gate open and crunched up the twisting path. A great block of hardened whiteness flumped onto my head when I jiggered the doorhandle, and I shiver-stepped inside; shaking my hair vigorously and slamming the wooden frame behind me.

Sparse living conditions greeted me; wooden chairs and a wooden table, countless used candles deformed by bulbous lumps, and a foosty old sofa sporting a gunky stain collage. The large windows held the most attractive element - rolling hills smothered in fresh, powdery snow, tumbling down to a thin stretch of dead beach being licked by slick black water. Further off vast, jutting cliffs topped with white icing rose to claim the sky as a feathery gauze eddied and whirled over all.

I had barely set my bag down when a frantic knocking shook through the floor.

The door was re-opened to a small, fidgeting, wiry-bearded fellow, tapping his feet and peering anxiously through pebble eyes.

'Hello?' I offered, tired and somewhat surprised at the visitation. The promise of solitude had been the deciding factor in my acceptance of the house; two or three other small houses dotted the beach front, but other than that it was cut off.

'Are you-are you my tulpa?' The man stammered, the tiny eyes in his owlish face narrowing. 

I paused, and his words were carried off in a flurry of dancing flakes.

'I'm afraid I don't know what you mean,' I retorted. His face creased into a crumply mask of confusion and the little eye-beads shifted before sparking upright. In another moment his right arm, caked with a layer of snow, was gripping my own.

'There's been a murder,' he cried, sniffling and pointing, 'a horrible murder!'

Then he was off and running, gesticulating wildly, stumpy arms flapping while his legs sunk into soft pillows of snow.

*

Tucking my scarf into my coat, I strode after him. The interruption and the oddness of the conversation had thrown me, but the word murder and the frenzied demeanour of the man demanded action of some sort.

'Ahoy there!' I shouted through growing white clouds. 'You must contact the police! You must phone-' but my words dissolved into the flurry around me. Great papery flakes were circling around me now, clumping on my hair and settling on my eyelashes as I waded. I could see the little man's shape scarpering on; a black smudge in the sea of white, throwing back looks and urgent waves.

I was close to catching him as two houses manifested within the shifting curtain of snow. My guide was making a bee-line for a small, flat-roofed home further ahead, but I turned to look at the disjointed stone structure to my right as I dragged my legs in and out of white folds. 

Through a small window indented into the lonely abode I could see an old man peering out. The pane swam with snowflakes but I could make out the pasty contours of his aged face. It may have been the unsettling circumstances or the nature of his portait, seen as it was through a brushy thick net, but his stone eyes looked as if they wished death upon me. 

A sudden rush of whirling snow threw the vision into a blur and I cast it to the back of my mind, stomping down to the second house right on the beachfront.

The little man was grappling with the doorhandle and I crunched across the remaining stretch of grey beach, hard and gravelly underfoot, to join him. His shock of beard was crusted with flakes and he hissed as he clicked the wooden door open.

'In here, in here, terrible, terrible!'

The scene within was indeed disturbing. Another rustic living room greeted us; a white-haired older man sat rigid in a dirty-looking armchair, and in the centre of the room, slumped upon a mangy rug, lay a bloody body.

I felt in that moment, dusting soggy clouds from my hair, as if something had brought me to this place.

The man in the chair pulled himself to his feet as I was focusing on a beaded red trickle bubbling from a hole in a section of collapsed cheek. 

'Thankyou so much for coming,' he wheezed deeply, 'we were distraught. Thomas here simply fled out the house in a state. I hadn't realised you had moved in - I assumed he would return when he had calmed down. You must excuse him - he's very fragile.'

Thomas was skulking round the body, prodding it with his feet and muttering teary nonsense.

'As you can see,' the man continued, running a shaking hand through his white hair, 'there is little you can do here. Our friend is dead. Very much dead.'

'But you must phone the police!' I snapped, leaning down to look closer into the mashed features pressed into the rug on the floor. They looked oddly familiar. I could have sworn the haircut, starched though it was with sticky blood, matched my own. 'Who is this man?'

'He was our friend.' offered the old man again, his voice low, booming and melodic as he regained his composure. 'And we will not be able to contact anybody until the weather changes. The phone lines are down; finding us can be treacherous in these conditions.'

Collectively we turned to the window, where insistent, dotted cycles of glowing whiteness seemed to multiply before our very eyes. Swathes of pirouetting bushy flakes melded into a soft, shifting wall.

'I'm sorry, but who is this man?' I asked again.

'He is not my tulpa!' Squealed Thomas, pointing at me and slapping at an oilish puddle of blood. The old man tottered over and clasped a firm hand over his shoulder.

'Calm now, Thomas, calm now.' Still patting reassurances, he turned to me.

'Thomas has personality problems, as I'm sure you've gathered. He struggles with his own identity at times - right now he seems to be convinced he is capable of projecting a tulpa. One of his many flights of fancy.'

'I'm not familiar with the word,' I murmured, but my mind was swimming with other thoughts. I felt a deep need to escape this house - there was little I could do to help here at this moment, and the dynamics of the conversation were troubling me; but the snow seemed to be battering any possibility of escape away. Perhaps this was what too much solitude did to you. 

At the same time, the entire world felt different here - the way the snow moved, the distant tickle of wired static coursing through the air - maybe there are such places in the world as exist within their own rules; something in the correct gathering of elements, little systems of their own...

I was struggling now to remember how I had come to arrive here. I had wanted solitude...or a holiday, or had I retired? But I was a young man. 

'Oh, it is just one of his silly ideas! A tulpa is a...thought, or a wish, that has...become whole, become real. He wants to think he can body forth his greatest wishes! He is always nattering on about this these days. So I don't doubt that when he rushed off into the snow, wishing for help, that he believed he had conjured you up, or some drivel!'

Thomas fidgeted with his jacket and slumped down in the corner. The old man laughed, a rolling, percussive sound. I wanted desperately to draw attention to the man on the floor, to bring about some kind of rational conversation and help the poor departed soul, but my thoughts were continually drawn to the snow in the window.

'Look...listen, who is this man?' I asked yet again, firmly.

'He was our friend. And you, our new friend, you must stay the night. There is nothing we can do now. We must wait until this weather changes. Finding your way home would be treacherous in these conditions.'

I felt the spark needling in the air again and I wished to object, but I also felt an uncontrollable tiredness spreading a heavy weight over my body. Thomas and the man had their hands on my shoulders, on my back...they were laying me down to rest...

*

Thick folds of night wrapped around my eyes as they snapped open. I was in the dirty armchair, my head lolling to one side. I must have been so tired after my journey. Moving my fingers over the armrests, I waited for my eyes to adjust to the dark. It was freezing cold. I could see the shape of the body on the floor, like a long black hole cut out in the original black. 

The other two, those two strange people; they must have gone to their beds. Even in the chill of night, wedged into this armchair in this weird house, I felt my wits returning to me. I must have needed sleep more than I realised. The little man...he clearly needed help. How terrible; to be out here with his odd housemate, both of them living inside their own heads.

The window was fringed with a soft glow and I could see the continuous torrent of scrappy shapes still flurrying about, a dark whirlwind howling now. In my immediate vicinity shadows stretched and bled, washing over the black form on the floor. I strained my eyes. 

Between the white flickers spiralling in the window, a firmer white oval gestated, and I saw an old man's face pushing right against the glass. I knew this face. The old man from the first house we had passed, that little stone house. Those hateful, intent eyes. I was melded to my seat, my fingers still scratching the armrests as I watched his mouth opening in a deep soundless scream. Webbed wrinkles were illuminated and his fist raised to clatter against the glass, as if...in warning...

A wet hand slithered from the gloom and wrapped around my neck, pulling me with terrible strength from the armchair. In a moment I was on the floor next to the heap of body, a great weight pinning me down. 

In the leaking light I saw Thomas straddling my chest. Yet he looked somehow different...he was dripping in some kind of mucus; blotches of spongey matter clung to his beard and skin. Then his fists were raining down on me, pounding my head against the floor. My face was twisted to the side and through the barrage I saw Thomas again - squatted in the corner, urging, throwing fists through the shadows. The white-haired man stood in a doorway across the room, sipping from a glass and observing.

Thomas' tulpa, bodied forth...

It shook slivers of yellow bile over me and hammered down another balled fist. Kicking my feet out, I cast the screeching creature across the room and rolled over, running for the door. I heard the deep voice of the white-haired man, Thomas's stammering, the guttural cry of the tulpa as it skidded across the wooden surface, flexing sticky muscles.  

In another moment I was out in the snow, slamming the door and pushing through the heavy white blanket. My feet crunched and sunk into hills of powder but I pushed on and on, thick melting flakes spinning and clinging to my bruised face.

I felt like I had run for miles by the time I collapsed on my knees into the soft white spread. It rose to my waist and I stayed sunken there, sucking in air. Layers of white gathered on my shoulders and hair. I did not believe it could follow me. I believed, with some kind of ingrained certainty, that it was confined to the house, the house with its strange static air. But I could not remember where my own home was. 

It was only when the black cushioning beyond the blustery white curtain began to separate, that I realised I was near to the stone house we had passed on our way to that awful place.

In the soft net I could see the old man at his window, and I could see then that it was me. I knew the lines and subtleties of my own face even in its advanced age, and if I had been blind to them before it was only because I had been blocking out the truth. 

I could see him peering and knocking now, conveying his orders, just as he had tried to warn me not long ago. There was a battle going on in this place, wherever it was. There was a war between these homes and I was no more than a pawn here.

My hands were red raw in the cold but I grasped fistfuls of snow and broke them under my nails. I felt heartbroken. A sliver of yellow ran down my forehead as the great snowstorm rippled and flurried, caking me into the ground. I was a tulpa, another disposable tulpa; bodied forth, here to serve.

***